Dallas Business and Marketing Blog

I run a blog called ComTech News that I started a few years ago that has a pretty good readership at this point. I discuss a lot of technology stuff there but 80% or more is about Internet Marketing, Blogging, SEO or similar topics. About 4 months ago I did a post about Donald Trump’s blog where I was how shall we say, less then kind about it.

The post was never really about Trump or meant to be negative in any way about him or his organization. It was really for my readers (many of whom are Corporate Marketers) to understand a fundamental mistake that many companies are making today. That is blogging with out real “voice” and putting to much “sales speak” into blogging. The reality was there were some great posts on the Trump blog (Trump’s personal ones were great) but these mistakes were being made as well. I only used the Trump blog as an example because it was very well known and I felt it would make my readers more willing to admit their own mistakes.

Then something happened I never expected, several members of the blog team showed up, and opened up a discussion with me on my blog. Needless to say the discussion was a bit warm (not heated but warm). I did my best at that point to explain my criticism and do what ever I could to suggest improvements to what was currently being done. I also then posted a follow up post pointing out the many things Trump’s team was doing right. Over time we developed a relationship and just last week we signed a consulting agreement with Trump University to help them with things like improving rankings and conversions for their real estate training and wealth creation training programs.

Now let me be clear this is not the direct path I would suggest for finding new clients! In fact if I had the whole thing to do over again I would have tempered my words a bit, yet to me there are a few real lessons here.

1. Smart business people appreciate honesty so long as you have a solution to match the problems you point out.

2. Blogging indeed is worth doing, for our relatively new company to have landed a client with this level of name recognition with a phone call or by conventional sales means would have been very unlikely.

3. Companies do pay attention to what is being said about them, so be careful what you said about who.

4. When a person responds to your blog posting it is good practice to take the time to answer their questions, concerns and points fully and with a sincere desire to be helpful, even if the discussion did not start off on the best foot.

5. When you are willing to help others sooner or later it all tends to come back to you.

So while again I do not recommend that you go out and point out faults publicly on your blog of major companies in hopes of landing business with them I think there is much to be learned from the process that took place here. The real relationship with Trump’s team came after the post. It came with free advice, several somewhat consultative phone calls and a clear message that we would never let them down as a client, yet it started with a far from conventional blog post.

If you would like to see the initial post, the follow up comments and my second post you can view them here,

Initial Post

Follow Up Post

One thing is for certain we are very happy to be working with such a world class organization and brand and will be doing all we can to improve traffic and conversion for our new partner.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: blog marketing, blogging, social media, web 2.0, franklin spirko, internet marketing

Popularity: 19% [?]